Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

JOURNALISM

According to the World Almanac for 1921 the daily circulation of newspapers in the big cities of the United States in 1914 (evidently the most recent year for which the figures have been compiled) was more than forty million. For the six months ending April 1, 1920, the average daily circulation of five morning newspapers and eleven evening newspapers in Greater New York City was, as shown by sworn statements, more than three and a third million. These statistics cover only daily newspapers, not weekly or monthly journals; and the figures for New York do not include papers in languages other than English. The American certainly buys newspapers. To what extent he reads them it is impossible to determine. But we may fairly assume that the great majority of literate inhabitants of the United States of all ages are every day subjected in some measure to the influence of the newspaper. No other institution approaches the newspaper in universality, persistence, continuity of influence. Not the public school, with all other schools added to it, has such power over the national mind; for in the lives of most people formal schooling is of relatively short duration, ceasing with adolescence or earlier. The church? Millions of people never go to church, and the day when the clergy dominated human thought is gone for ever. If we add to the daily press the weekly and monthly periodicals, with a total circulation per issue of two hundred million (for the year 1914), we shall not be far wrong in saying that the journalist, with the powers behind him, has more to do, for good or for evil, than the member of any other profession, in creating and shaping the thoughts of the multitude. Compared with him the teacher, the preacher, the artist, the politician, the man of science, are restricted, interrupted, indirect in reaching the minds of their fellow-men.

So that in estimating the capacities and contents of the American mind, which we have no means of lining up in its hundred million individual manifestations and examining directly, an analysis of the American newspaper is a fair rough-and-ready method. What everybody reads does not tell the whole story of what everybody is, but it tells a good deal. Moreover, it is not necessary to analyze any one newspaper or to separate its clientèle from that of any other newspaper. For though everybody knows that the New York Tribune and the New York World have distinct qualities which differentiate them from each other, that some papers are better and some are worse, yet on the whole the American newspaper is amazingly uniform from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. It is, indeed, a more or less unified institution fed by the same news services and dominated by kindred financial interests. If you travel much, as actors do, without interest in local affairs, when you go to the hotel news-stand in the morning, you cannot tell from the general aspect of the newspaper you pick up what city you are in; and in a small city it is likely to be a metropolitan paper that has come a hundred miles or more during the night. Indeed, this is the first thing to be learned about the American from a study of his newspapers, that he lacks individuality, is tediously uniform, and cut according to one intellectual pattern. He may have his “favourite” newspaper, and with no sense that his confession of habitude is shameful he may write the editor that he has read it constantly for forty years. But if it goes out of existence, like his favourite brand of chewing-gum or cigarettes, there is no aching void which cannot be comfortably filled by a surviving competitor. Editors, except those in charge of local news, move with perfect ease from one city to another; it is the same old job at a different desk.

The standardization of the newspaper reader and the standardization of the journalist are two aspects of the same thing. As a citizen, a workman, a human being, the journalist is simply one of us, a victim of the conformity which has overwhelmed the American. When we speak of the influence of the journalist, we are not speaking of an individual, but of “the powers behind him,” of which he is nothing but the wage-earning servant, as impotent and unimportant, considered as an individual, as a mill-hand. Journalism in America is no longer a profession, through which a man can win to a place of real dignity among his neighbours. If we had a Horace Greeley to-day, he would not be editor of a newspaper. He would not wish to be, and he would not be allowed to be. Certainly his vigorous integrity would not be tolerated in the modern unworthy successor of the newspaper which he founded. The editor of a newspaper is no doubt often a man of intelligence and experience and he may be well paid, like the manager of a department store; but he is usually submerged in anonymity except that from time to time the law requires the newspaper to publish his name. His subordinates, assistant editors, newswriters, reporters, and the rest, are as nameless as floor-walkers, shipping clerks, salesladies, and ladies engaged in more ancient forms of commerce.

It is true that during the last generation there has been a tendency in the newspaper to “feature” individuals, such as cartoonists, conductors of columns, writers on sport, dramatic critics, and so on. But these men are artists, some of them very clever, who have nothing to do with the news but contribute to the paper its vaudeville entertainment. During the war there was a great increase in the amount of signed cable matter and correspondence. This was due to the necessity of the prosperous newspaper to show its enterprise and to cajole its readers into believing that it had men of special ability in close touch with diplomats and major-generals collecting and cabling at great expense intimate information and expert opinion. The circumstances were so difficult that the wisest and most honest man could not do much, except lose his position, and nobody will blame the correspondents. But it is significant that not a single American correspondent emerged from the conflict who is memorable, from the point of view of a more or less careful reader, as having been different from the rest. If from a miscellaneous collection of clippings we should cut off the dates, the alleged place of origin and the names of the correspondents, nobody but an editor with a long and detailed memory could tell t’other from which, or be sure whether the despatch was from Mr. Jones, the special correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor (copyright by the Chicago News) or an anonymous cable from the London office of the Associated Press. And even the editor, who may be assumed to know the names of hundreds of his colleagues and competitors, would begin his attempt at identification by examining the style of type to see if it looked like a column from the Sun or from the World. Almost all the war news was a hopeless confusion of impressions, of reports of what somebody said somebody else, “of unquestionable authority,” had heard from reliable sources, and of sheer mendacity adapted to the momentary prejudices of the individual managing editor, the American press as a whole, and the American people. And this is a rough recipe for all the news even in times of peace, for the war merely aggravated the prevalent diseases of the newspapers.

Since the purpose of this book is to discuss peculiarly American characteristics, it should be said at once that the tendency of the newspaper to obliterate the journalist as a person immediately responsible to the public is not confined to America. Economic conditions in Europe and America are fundamentally alike, and the modern newspaper in every country must be a business institution, heavily capitalized, and conducted for profit. In England the decline of journalism as a profession and the rise of the “stunt” press has been noted and deplored by Englishmen. Years ago it meant something to be editor of the London Times, and the appointment of a new man to the position was an event not less important than a change in the cabinet. Who is editor of the Times now is a matter of no consequence except to the man who receives the salary check. English journalism is in almost as bad a case as American. In England, however, there is at least one exception which has no counterpart in America, the Manchester Guardian; this admirable newspaper has the good fortune to be owned by people who are so rich that they are not obliged, and so honest that they are not willing, to sell out. It is this fact which has afforded Mr. Scott, the editor-in-chief for nearly half a century, an opportunity adequate to his courage and ability. There are few such opportunities in England, and none in America. Even the Springfield Republican has largely lost its old character.

As for the continental papers, one who does not read any of them regularly is in no position to judge. In 1900 William James, a shrewd observer, wrote in a letter: “The Continental papers of course are ‘nowhere.’ As for our yellow papers—every country has its criminal classes, and with us and in France, they have simply got into journalism as part of their professional evolution, and they must be got out. Mr. Bosanquet somewhere says that so far from the ‘dark ages’ being over, we are just at the beginning of a new dark-age period. He means that ignorance and unculture, which then were merely brutal, are now articulate and possessed of a literary voice, and the fight is transferred from fields and castles and town walls to ‘organs of publicity.’” This is only a passing remark in an informal letter. But it is a partial explanation of American yellow journalism which in twenty years has swamped the whole press, including papers that pretend to be respectable, and it suggests what the state of things was, and is, in France.

It should be noted, however, that personal journalism has not entirely disappeared in France, that the editor can still be brought to account, sometimes at the point of a pistol, for lies and slander, and that a young French littérateur, before he has won his spurs in poetry, drama, or fiction, can regard journalism as an honourable occupation in which it is worth while to make a name.

With the decadence in all countries, certainly in America, of the journalist as a professional man in an honourable craft, there might conceivably have been a gain in objectivity, in the right sort of impersonality. Anonymity might have ensured a dispassionate fidelity to facts. But there has been no such gain. Responsibility has been transferred from the journalist to his employers, and he is on his mettle to please his employers, to cultivate whatever virtues are possible to journalism, accuracy, clearness of expression, zeal in searching out and interpreting facts, only in so far forth as his employers demand them, only as his livelihood and chances of promotion depend on them. The ordinary journalist, being an ordinary human being, must prefer to do honest work; for there is no pleasure in lying, though there is a temptation to fill space with unfounded or unverified statements. And if his manager orders him to find a story where there is no story, or to find a story of a certain kind where the facts lead to a story of another kind, he will not come back empty-handed lest he go away empty-handed on pay-day. Any one who has worked in a newspaper office knows that the older men are likely to be weary and cynical and that the younger men fall into two classes, those who are too stupid to be discontented with any aspect of their position except the size of their salaries, and those who hope either to rise to the better paid positions, or to “graduate,” as they put it, from daily journalism to other kinds of literary work.

The journalist, then, should be acquitted of most of the faults of journalism. Mr. Walter Lippmann says in his sane little book, “Liberty and the News”: “Resistance to the inertias of the profession, heresy to the institution, and willingness to be fired rather than write what you do not believe, these wait on nothing but personal courage.” That is a little like saying that the harlot can stop harlotry by refusing to ply her trade—which is indeed the attitude of some people in comfortable circumstances. I doubt if Mr. Lippmann would have written just as he did if he had ever had to depend for his dinner on pleasing a managing editor, if he had not been from very early in his brilliant career editor of a liberal endowed journal in which he is free to express his beliefs. Most newspaper men are poor and not brilliant. The correspondents whom Mr. Lippmann mentions as “eminences on a rather flat plateau” are nearly all men who have succeeded in other work than newspaper correspondence, and if not a newspaper in the world would hire them, most of them could afford to thumb their noses at the Ochses, Reids, and Harmsworths. Personal courage is surely a personal matter, and it can seldom be effective in correcting the abuses of an institution, especially when the institution can hire plenty of men of adequate if not equal ability to take the place of the man of stubborn integrity. I know one journalist who lost his position as managing editor of two wealthy newspapers, one in Boston, the other in New York, in the first instance because he refused to print a false and cowardly retraction dictated by a stockholder whom the editor-in-chief desired to serve, in the second instance because he refused to distort war news. But what good did his single-handed rebellion do, except to make a few friends proud of him? Did either newspaper lose even one mournful subscriber? Did the advertising department suffer? Far from it. Another man took his place, a man not necessarily less honest, but of more conformable temperament. The muddy waters of journalism did not show a ripple. Paradoxically, the journalist is the one man who can do little or nothing to improve journalism. Mr. Lippmann’s suggestion that our salvation lies “ultimately in the infusion of the news-structure by men with a new training and outlook,” is, as he knows, the expression of a vague hope, too remotely ultimate to have practical bearing on the actual situation. The man of training and outlook, especially of outlook, is the unhappiest man in the employ of a newspaper. His salvation, if not ours, lies in getting out of newspaper work and applying his ability and vision in some occupation which does not discourage precisely the merits which an honest institution should foster. This is not merely the opinion of a critical layman but represents accurately if not literally the advice given to me by a successful editor and writer of special articles. “In this game,” he said, “you lose your soul.”

The stories of individuals who have tried to be decent in newspaper work and have been fired might be valuable if they were collated and if the better journalists would unite to lay the foundation in fact of more such stories. But a profession, a trade, which has so little sense of its own interest that it does not even make an effective union (to be sure, the organization of newspaper writers met with some success, especially in Boston, but to-day the organization has practically disappeared) to keep its wages up can never be expected to unite in the impersonal interests of truth and intellectual dignity. The individual who charges against an enormous unshakable institution with the weapons of his personal experience is too easily disposed of as a sore-head and is likely to be laughed at even by his fellow-journalists who know that in the main he is right.

This has happened to Mr. Upton Sinclair. I have studied “The Brass Check” carefully for the selfish purpose of getting enough material so that the writing of this chapter should be nothing but a lazy man’s task of transcription, not to speak of the noble ethical purpose of reforming the newspaper by exposing its iniquities. I confess I am disappointed. “The Brass Check” is a mixture of autobiography, valuable in its way to those who admire Mr. Sinclair, as I do most sincerely, and of evidence which, though properly personal, ought to be handled in an objective manner. I am puzzled that a man of “training and outlook,” who has shown in at least one of his novels an excellent sense of construction, could throw together such a hodge-podge of valid testimony, utterly damning to his opponents, and naïve trivialities, assertions insecurely founded and not important if they were well founded. I am so sure that Mr. Sinclair is on the whole right that I am reluctant to criticize him adversely, to lend a shadow of encouragement to the real adversary, who is unscrupulous and securely entrenched. But as a journalist of “training and outlook” I lament that another journalist of vastly more ability, experience, and information should not have done better work in selecting and constructing his material. As a lawyer said to his client, “You are a saint and you are right, but a court-room is no place for a saint and you are a damn bad witness.” Mr. Sinclair’s evidence, however, is all there to be dug out by whoever has the will and the patience. If one-tenth of it is valid and nine-tenths of doubtful value, the one-tenth is sufficient to show the sinister forces behind the newspapers and to explain some of the reasons why the newspapers are untrustworthy, cowardly, and dishonest.

Though Mr. Sinclair tells some damaging stories about the sins of anonymous reporters and of the prostitution of writers like the late Elbert Hubbard, who had no excuse for being anything but honest and independent, yet Mr. Sinclair on the whole would agree with me that the chief responsibility for the evils of journalism does not rest upon the journalist. He tries to place it squarely where it belongs on the owners of the press and the owners of the owners. But it is difficult to determine how the weight of guilt is distributed, for the press is a monster with more than two legs.

Part of the responsibility rests upon the reader, if indeed the reader is to blame for being a gullible fool and for buying shoddy goods. Mr. Lippmann says: “There is everywhere an increasingly angry disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of being baffled and misled.” And Mr. Sinclair says: “The people want the news; the people clamour for the news.” Both these statements may be true. But where do the learned doctors find the symptoms? A few of us who have some special interest in the press, in publicity, in political problems, are disillusioned and resentful. Probably everybody has said or heard somebody else say: “That’s only a newspaper story,” or “You cannot believe everything you read.” But such mild scepticism shows no promise of swelling to an angry demand on the part of that vague aggregate, the People, for better, more honest newspapers, to such an angry demand as you can actually hear in any house you enter for cheaper clothes and lower taxes.

If we make a rough calculation of the number of papers sold and of the number of people in the main economic classes, it is evident that papers of large circulation must go by the million to the working-people. Well, is there any sign of growing wrath in the breasts of the honest toilers against the newspapers, against Mr. Hearst’s papers, which throw them sops of hypocritical sympathy, not to speak of papers which are openly unfair in handling labour news? Or consider the more prosperous classes. In the smoking-car of any suburban train bound for New York some morning after eight o’clock, look at the men about you, business men, the kind that work, or do something, in offices. They are reading the Times and the Tribune. There may be some growls about something in the day’s news, something that has happened on the stock-market, or a stupid throw to third base in yesterday’s game. But is there any murmur of discontent with the newspaper itself? I fail to find any evidence of widespread disgust with the newspaper as it is and a concomitant hunger for something better. The Reader, the Public is mute, if not inglorious, and accepts uncritically what the daily press provides. The reader has not much opportunity to choose the better from the worse. If he gives up one paper he must take another that is just as bad. He is between the devil and the deep sea, as when he casts his ballot for Democrat or Republican. And if he votes Socialist he gets the admirable New York Call, which is less a newspaper than a vehicle of propaganda. When one paper is slightly more honest and intelligent than its rivals, the difference is so slight that only those especially interested in the problems of the press are aware of it. For example, in discussing these problems with newspaper men, with critical readers of the press, persons for any reason intelligently interested in the problems, I have never found one who did not have a good word to say for the New York Globe. It is so appreciably more decent than the other New York papers that I can almost forgive it for thrusting Dr. Frank Crane under my nose when I am looking at the amusing pictures of Mr. Fontaine Fox—the newspaper vaudeville has to supply stunts for all juvenile tastes. Yet the Globe does not find a clamorous multitude willing to reward it for its superiority to its neighbours, which I grant is too slight for duffers to discern. The American reader of newspapers, that is, almost everybody, is a duffer, so far as the newspaper is concerned, uncritical, docile, only meekly incredulous. It may be that “the people” get as good newspapers as they wish and deserve, just as they are said to get as good government as they wish and deserve. Certainly if the readers of newspapers seem to demand nothing better, the manufacturers of newspapers have no inducement to give them anything better. But this does not get us any nearer a solution of the problem or do more than indicate that some vaguely indeterminate part of the responsibility for the evils of the newspapers must rest on the people who buy them.

From the buyer to the seller is the shortest step. The newspaper is a manufacturing concern producing goods to sell at a profit; it is also a department store, and it has some characteristics that suggest the variety show and the brothel. But the newspaper differs from all other commodities in that it does not live by what it receives from the consumer who buys it. Three cents multiplied a million times does not support a newspaper. The valuable part of a newspaper from the manufacturer’s point of view, and also to a great extent from the reader’s point of view, is the advertisements. The columns of “reading matter,” so called, are little more than bait to attract enough readers to make the paper worth while as a vehicle for advertisements. It is of no importance to the management whether a given column contain news from Washington or Moscow, true or false, or a scandal or a funny story, as long as it leads some thousands of human eyes to look at it and so to look at adjacent columns in which are set forth the merits of a safety razor or an automobile tire or a fifty-dollar suit of clothes at thirty-nine dollars and a half. There has to be a good variety and a certain balance of interest in the columns of reading matter to secure the attention of all kinds of people. This accounts for two things, the great development in the newspaper of pure, or impure, entertainment, of more or less clever features, at the expense of space that might be devoted to news, and also the tendency to accentuate narrative interest above all other kinds of interest. A reporter is never sent out by his chief to get information, but always, in the lingo of the office, to get a “story.” This is sound psychology. Everybody likes a story, and there are only a few souls in the world who yearn at breakfast for information. To attack the newspaper for being sensational is to forget that all the great stories of the world, from the amatory exploits of Helen of Troy and Cleopatra to the scandalous adventures of Mrs. Black, the banker’s wife, are sensational and should be so treated. The newspaper manager is indifferent to every quality in his news columns except their power to attract the reader and so secure circulation and so please the advertiser. And the advertiser has as his primary interest only that of bringing to the attention of a certain number of people the virtues of his suspenders, shoes, and soothing syrup.

But the advertiser has a secondary interest. The newspaper willy-nilly deals with ideas, such as they are. No idea inimical to the advertiser’s business or in general to the business system of which he is a dependent part must be allowed in the paper. Therefore all newspapers are controlled by the advertising department, that is, the counting-room. They are controlled negatively and positively. We are discussing general characteristics and have not space for detailed evidence. But one or two cases will suffice.

An example of the coercion of the newspaper by the advertiser was recently afforded by the Philadelphia press. The Gimbel Brothers, owners of a department store, were charged by United States Government officials with profiteering. The only Philadelphia paper that made anything of the story was the Press, which was owned by Mr. Wanamaker of the rival department store. The other papers ignored the story or put it in one edition and then withdrew it. If there is an elevator accident in a general office building, it is reported. If there is a similar accident in a department store, it is usually not reported. When the New York Times (April 25, 1921) prints a short account of the experience of four Wellesley college students who disguised their intellectual superiority and got jobs in department stores, the head-line tells us that they “Find They Can Live on Earnings,” though the matter under the head-line does not bear this out. Perhaps it does no harm to suppress, or fail to publish, news of accidents and to make out a good case for the living and working conditions of shop-girls. These are minor matters in the news of the world and their importance would appear only if they were accumulated in their tediously voluminous mass.

The positive corruption of the newspaper by the advertiser goes deeper and proceeds from larger economic powers than individual merchants. There is all over the world a terrific economic contest between the employing classes and the wage-earning classes. The dramatic manifestation of this contest is the strike. Almost invariably the news of a strike is, if not falsified, so shaped as to be unfavourable to the workers. In the New York Nation of January 5, 1921, Mr. Charles G. Miller, formerly editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, exposes the lies of the Pittsburgh papers during the steel strike. In two weeks the Pittsburgh papers published more than thirty pages of paid advertisements denouncing the leadership of the strike and invoking “Americanism” against radicalism and syndicalism. The news and editorial attitude of the papers coincided with the advertisements and gave the impression that the strikers were disloyal, un-American, bolshevik. They were silent on the real questions at issue, hours, pay, working conditions. And not only the Pittsburgh press but the press of the entire country was poisoned. For the Associated Press and other news services are not independent organizations feeding news to their clients but simply interrelated newspapers swapping each other’s lies. The Denver newspapers control all the news that is read in Boston about the Colorado coal mines. The Boston newspapers control all the news that is read in San Francisco about the New England textile mills. The head of a local bureau of the Associated Press is not a reporter; he is merely a more or less skilful compiler and extracter who sends to the nation, to the whole world, matter which is furnished him by the papers of his district. So that he can usually hold up his hand and swear to the honesty of his service; he is like an express agent who ships a case of what he thinks is canned corn, and it is not his fault if there is opium concealed in the case.

The power of the advertiser to make the newspaper servile and right in its opinions is not confined to the local department store or the special industry operating through a district press. Nor is it confined to the negative punishment of withdrawing advertising of commodities like hosiery, chewing gum, and banking service from papers that offend their masters. There is another method of exerting this power, and that is to buy advertising space in which to set forth ideas calculated to influence public opinion. Here is a full page from a New York paper containing a cartoon and text, the main idea of which is that Labour and Capital should pull together. It is signed by “‘America First’ Publicity Association” and is Bulletin No. 115 in a series—“be sure to read them all.” This full-page bulletin, of which there have already been more than a hundred, appeared in many newspapers—I do not know how many; and a full page costs a good deal of money. What is the object of this patriotic association? The prevailing theme of the bulletins which I have seen is “Labour be good! Fight Bolshevism! Beware the Agitator!” Who is going to be influenced by these bulletins? Not the workingman. He knows what he wants, and if he is the dupe of agitators and false theories, these sermons can never rescue him. Not the capitalist. He knows what he wants, and gets it. Perhaps the little middle-class fellow may swallow such buncombe on his daily journey between his office and his home in the suburbs. But he is already an intellectually depraved servant of the employing classes, and it is not worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete and confirm his corruption. The primary object of the advertisement is to keep the newspaper “good,” to encourage its editorial departments, through the advertising department, not to fall below 99 and 44/100% pure Americanism or admit ideas inimical to the general interests of chambers of commerce, manufacturers’ associations, and other custodians of the commonweal. I suspect that some clever advertising man has stung the gentlemen who supply the money for this campaign of education, but what is a few million to them? The man who can best afford to laugh is the business manager of the newspaper when he looks at the check and meditates on the easy money of some of his advertising clients and the easy credulity of some of his reading clients.

It may be argued that the newspaper, which is a business, ought to be controlled, directly and indirectly, by business interests; and certainly if we allow the commercial powers to manage our food supply, transportation, and housing, it is a relatively minor matter if the same powers dominate our press. In like manner if we tolerate dishonest governments, we are only dealing with an epiphenomenon when we consider the dishonest and inefficient treatment by the press of public affairs, national and international. All the news of politics, diplomacy, war, world-trade emanates from government officials or from those who are interested in turning to their own advantage the actions of officials. Business is behind government, and government is behind business; which comes first is unimportant like the problem of the chicken and the egg. It is a partnership of swindle, and though the details of the relation are infinitely complicated, the relation in itself is easy to understand and accounts quite simply for the fact that world news is the most viciously polluted of all the many kinds of news. The efforts of a merchant to keep up the good name of his department store, or of a group of manufacturers to break a strike are feeble and even reasonable, so far as they use the newspapers, compared to the audacious perversion of truth by the combination of arch criminals, government and international business.

The star example in modern times is the current newspaper history of Russia. The New York Nation of March 6, 1920, published an article showing that in the columns of the New York Times Lenin had died once, been almost killed three times, and had fallen and fled innumerable times. The New Republic published August 4, 1920, a supplement by Lippmann and Merz summarizing the news which the Times printed about Russia during the three years preceding March 1920. The analysis shows an almost unbroken daily misrepresentation of the programme, purposes and strength of the Russian government and continuous false “optimism,” as the writers gently call it, about the military exploits of Russia’s enemies, the “white hopes,” Kolchak and Denekin. The writers expressly state that they did not select the Times because it is worse than other papers but, on the contrary, because it “is one of the really great newspapers of the world.” “Rich” or “powerful” would have been a better word than “great.” The sources of error in the Times were the Associated Press, the special correspondents of the Times, government officials and political factions hostile to the present Russian régime. Among the offenders was the United States Government or the journalistic fake-factory in or adjacent to the Department of State. At this writing the article in the New Republic has been out nearly a year, that in the Nation more than a year. It is fair to assume that they have been seen by the managers of the Times and other powerful journalists, that if there was any misstatement the weekly journals would have been forced to recant, which they have not done, and that if the Ochses of the newspaper world had any conscience they would have been at least more careful after such devastating exposures. But the game of “Lying about Lenin” goes merrily on.

The American government and the American press have not been more mendacious in their treatment of Russia than the governments and the press of other nations, but they have been more persistently stupid and unteachable in the face of facts. The British government has been engaged in an agile zigzag retreat from its first position of no intercourse with Russia, and when the London Labour Herald exposed the trick of Lloyd George which consisted of printing and sending out from Russia propaganda against the Soviet government, the prince of political liars was obliged to stop that fraud. On the other hand one of the first acts of our new administration was Mr. Hughes’s idiotic confirmation of the attitude held by the old administration, and he furnished the newspapers real news, since the Secretary’s opinions, however stupid, are real news, to add to their previous accumulation of ignorance and lies, and thereby encouraged them in their evil ways. If a government is composed of noodles and rogues, the press which reports the activities of the government and the opinions of its officials is only secondarily responsible for deceiving the public. The editors might be more critical in sifting the true from the false. But the newspaper has no motive for trying to correct the inherent vices of business and government; it does not originate those vices but merely concurs in them and reflects them. The newspaper is primarily responsible only for the stupidity and mendacity of its correspondents and editors. It is not an independent institution with its own ethic, with either will or full opportunity to serve the truth, but is only the symptom and expression of the vast corruption that lies behind it and of the dense popular ignorance that stands gaping before it.

The Dunciad of the Press does not end in quite universal darkness. There is a little light over the horizon. A new organization called The Federated Press, which endeavours to “get the news in spite of the newspapers and the great news agencies,” announces that already two hundred editors all over the world are using its service. It is too soon to tell how successful this enterprise will be, but it is a ray of promise, because it is an association of working journalists and not a vague aspiration of reformers and uplifters. Until some such organization does become powerful and by practical labour make an impression on the daily paper, we shall have to depend for enlightenment on a few weekly and monthly periodicals of relatively small circulation. Most of the popular weeklies and monthlies are as bad in their way as the newspapers, but they aim chiefly at entertainment; their treatment of the news in special articles and editorials is a subordinate matter, and their chief sin is not dishonesty but banality. The periodicals which do handle the news, always honestly, usually with intelligence, the Nation, the New Republic, the Freeman and one or two others, must have an influence greater than can be measured by their circulation; for though the giant press laughs at the cranky little Davids with their vicious radical ideas, and though it is too strong to be slain or even severely wounded, yet it cannot be quite insensible to the stones that fly from those valorous slings. It is, however, an indication of the low mental level of America that the combined circulation of these journals, which are, moreover, largely subscribed for by the same readers, is less than that of a newspaper in a second-rate city. Two of them are endowed or subsidized by liberal men of means and none of them is shiningly prosperous. An intelligent populace would buy them by the million. So we leave the responsibility where, after all, it belongs. The American press is an accurate gauge of the American mind.

John Macy